


All This Way

by eruthiel



Category: MarsCorp (Podcast)
Genre: Age Difference, Angst, Autism, First Crush, First Meetings, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Introspection, M/M, Pre-Canon, the shippiness is all david and very open to interpretation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-21
Updated: 2017-07-21
Packaged: 2018-12-05 04:27:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11570298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eruthiel/pseuds/eruthiel
Summary: "Wow, what a pretty smile! You look like a flower that suddenly decided to bloom!"





	All This Way

**Author's Note:**

> This just poured out of me, so I'm sorry for the abrupt ending & whatnot – also it's not super canon-compliant as of David's 2nd audio diary, but it's still inspired by that. This is almost pure emotion with the tiniest hint of action/dialogue. It's self-indulgent and soft !!!
> 
> To expand on the tags: this is loosely based on the version of events from _[taking back this town tonight,](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10475847)_ which has them meet when David is twelve. But his age isn't specified here. David's feelings for Colin are touched on, but Colin's POV isn't, and nothing explicitly happens between them besides some hair ruffling.
> 
> Title from [On Top of the World](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5tWYmIOWGk) by Imagine Dragons.

For a long time, David thought that the feeling called "happiness" was a fiction invented by adults. He didn't know why they made it up. He didn't know why everyone had to fake it all the time – who, exactly, were they meant to be fooling? Surely everyone knew it was fake? Unless the adults had all just been pretending so long that they fooled themselves.

Most pressingly, he didn't understand why everyone else was so much better at faking "happiness" than he was. His classmates seemed to have sprung up knowing exactly how and when to smile, what to say, what part of a person's face to look at. The eyes, his parents told him – but which eye? – not for too long or too short a time, and never too deeply. It was a nightmare to learn and put into clumsy practice what everyone else had already mastered with no apparent difficulty.

And there was never anything under the surface to back it up, no feeling he couldn't peg more accurately as fear (of being bullied) or relief (at not being bullied today) or whatever. It wasn't that he didn't have feelings! He had a whole bunch of them which he'd gladly trade in for a little peace and quiet. But "happiness"? What a scam. He'd done many of the things that were reputed to make people "happy" – come top in his class many times, sung the company song many times, eaten meat many times. They didn't all leave him _cold,_ exactly, but they didn't make him want to grin like everyone else.

As David hurtled towards adolescence and the avalanche of new experiences he'd been promised, he started to wonder, or rather to hope – hope that it might prove him wrong. What if "happiness" wasn't a con at all? What if it just took time to learn, and all this empty practice had been preparation for the endless joy of adulthood? One day he would wake up with hairs on his chest, a damp patch on the sheet, and the seed of something warm in his heart. So he hoped.

Or perhaps it would come for everyone else and leave him behind again.

David never voiced these concerns to anybody; he didn't really have friends, and he knew better than to try to open up to his parents. The effort of holding it in gave him headaches. His restraint was mistaken for sulkiness, and every remedy was tried to cure it: isolation from people; over-exposure to people; exercise; medication; strappings, canings and spankings... none of these things brought him any closer to happiness (although some of the medications were pleasant). His parents cried and screamed, at him and each other, while David silently sought the piece which by now he knew he was missing. Maybe he could keep coming top of his class without it, and maybe he could even run the Science Department someday, like his parents wanted, but if real happiness didn't come soon, then the pressure of trying to feign it would more likely drive him crazy.

And then it came, when he wasn't looking for it. Despite all his years of practice, he wasn't even ready for it. Maybe deep down, he still didn't believe it would ever come. If he hadn't already been seated, it would have knocked him over.

It came because he met someone: a man around his father's age, but kinder and more beautiful – and with no spouse or kids of his own, and no anger in his eyes. The happiness didn't come quite at first sight, though a range of other feelings did – including one _relatively_ new one which David didn't have a word for yet, but it felt like tiny sharks swimming around in his gut. (Sharks were Earth animals he saw in a film at school.)

No, the happiness came when the man smiled at him. It wasn't a normal smile – it was everything a normal smile was, but better, and richer, and truer, and..! At once David knew that the man wasn't laughing at him, wasn't scared of him, wasn't going to hurt him. Normally he felt mocked by other people's smiles, as if they were beaming out: "Look how fucking happy we are, you freak! Look what you're missing out on!" But not this one. This one ran a power cable right into David's heart and shocked it into life with a million volts of pure happiness.

For the first time, he felt his face moving of its own accord into a helpless little grin. He felt like a mushroom that had just started to glow. The man's eyes sparkled, white teeth flashing, and he tousled David's hair. "Wow, what a pretty smile! You look like a flower that suddenly decided to bloom!"

They didn't see each other for a while after that. The feeling didn't come back while the man was gone, but David dedicated his nights to remembering and recreating every detail of the scene in his mind. It was all the proof he had that he wasn't broken after all. And he knew – he knew – he knew that the feeling would come back, if he could just see that man again. If it meant seeing that man every day for the rest of his life, just to be normal, then so be it.

The lonely while passed, and they were back together again. And again and again, longer each time. David's plan of spending his whole life with this man seemed more and more feasible. And all the while the happiness was _growing._  It gathered momentum as it grew until the mushroom glow in his chest was so bright that it blotted out every other sensation – when they were together, he could hardly taste food, or hear the words coming out of his own mouth. The man seemed to like this, though, and soon it was just another part of David. His parents were relieved but not impressed by his improvement.

David didn't care. He didn't care about anything else anymore. All he knew was that, despite the insults hurled at him for as long as he could remember, he was finally normal after all; he was finally whole.


End file.
